Lion Corporation is Japan’s largest manufacturer of oral care and a wide range of beauty care and household products, including toothpastes, shampoos, body care, and laundry detergent products. It also sells over-the-counter pharmaceutical products, such as aspirin and cold medicine, through a licensing agreement with drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb. Its goal is to deliver quality products and contribute to the environment, and its customers' cleanliness, health, comfort.

After replacing Teradata, Lion Corporation had been using Oracle Exadata V2 for multiple applications, including SAP, production management, and business intelligence. Due to increasing POS data volume and the relocation of its data center, Lion wanted to upgrade its legacy Oracle Exadata to support better analysis and eliminate the failure of transporting hardware.

Challenges

Gain ability to rapidly process over a few hundred million pieces of data, such as sales transactions for products like toothpaste and laundry detergent, and support business growth

Upgrade the existing Oracle Exadata in the new datacenter instead of moving the physical machine to avoid the risk of hardware damage and ensure data security

Complete the database upgrade and datacenter relocation project within the specified timeline and budget

Ensure smooth data migration for business-critical applications, such as SAP ERP systems, to the new database platform and minimize disruption to critical manufacturing operations

Results

Provided executives with accurate business decision data, such as toothpaste sales, by accelerating query performance by up to 4x and processing data updates 2x faster with Oracle Exadata X5

Gained a flexible licensing model with Oracle Exadata and allowed the business to easily expand database or storage servers, such as upgrading from eighth rack to quarter rack, and improve system performance to support revenue growth

Achieved zero downtime since the upgrade to Oracle Exadata X5-2 and ensured high availability with the engineered system’s fully redundant hardware

Enabled big data analysis by using Oracle Database In-Memory’s dual-format architecture to optimize large volume of analytic queries, such as POS data for oral care products

Minimized risk and met the database upgrade and datacenter relocation project timeline and budget by deploying a pre-configured and pre-tested Oracle Exadata and enabling rapid deployment in the new datacenter

Reduced IT staff workload by gaining the capacity to consolidate even more databases and easily manage the upgrades and patching with Oracle Multitenant

We upgraded to Oracle Exadata because of its superior performance and capacity on-demand licensing model, giving us the flexibility to support future growth. Oracle Database 12c also helped to ensure seamless migration and minimize disruption to businesses.

— Akinori Murakami, Engineer, System Department, Lion Corporation

Execution

Lion Corporation upgraded its database platform with Oracle Database 12c and Oracle Exadata X5-2 and adopted Oracle Database Options including Oracle Multitenant and Oracle Database In-Memory to enable faster analysis and ensure seamless migration of business applications. With assistance from Oracle, Lion Corporation completed the project in less than four months and went live smoothly with the new platform.

About Lion Corporation

Headquarters

Tokyo, Japan

Employees

6,816

Annual Revenue

US$300 Million

Founded in 1891, Lion Corporation manufactures and sells oral care products, such as toothpaste and mouthwash, and other daily living products—ranging from toiletries to consumer household goods, cooking aids, and pharmaceutical products. It operates six sales offices, four manufacturing plants, and two research institutes locally. Lion Corporation also expanded its business in several Asian countries to promote healthy and comfortable lifestyles in the region.

Partners

Oracle Partner, SCSK Corporation worked as the system integrator for Lion Corporation’s Oracle Exadata and Oracle Database 12c upgrade project.

“SCSK provided us the most efficient and cost-effective migration plan. With its strong expertise in SAP applications, we quickly resolved various licensing and installation issues as we were the first company in Japan to migrate databases for SAP applications into Oracle Database 12c,” Murakami said.